[Cognitive screening in stroke patients in rehabilitation: standards for clinical practice]

Shortened neuropsychological assessment (cognitive screening) is usually conducted in order to gain insight into the cognitive functioning of stroke patients quickly and globally in order to identify in an early stage factors which can facilitate or hamper the rehabilitation process, to formulate recommendations concerning extensive neuropsychological assessment and to enable recommendations concerning treatment and consultation. Ideally every stroke patient should receive neuropsychological testing during the first few weeks after admission to a rehabilitation setting. Cognitive screening is an efficient way to assess all patients for the psychologist as well as the rest of the rehabilitation team, and is less distressing for the patients than extensive neuropsychological testing. For standard use of cognitive screening, normative data are a useful tool; however, for some well known and frequently used neuropsychological tests there are no normative data for Dutch stroke patients available. In this paper we therefore present the results of a standardized cognitive screening which is used in the Hoensbroeck Rehabilitation Centre since 1996. The results are based on a stroke population of 275 persons, being tested during the first two months after suffering from a first stroke. In addition, a group of forty healthy partners of the stroke patients were assessed with the same battery of tests, in order to generate norms for healthy matched persons. The results of the two groups can be used as norms in comparable clinical settings.